Plant Genetics and Development

Molecular Breeding & Genomics of Tef

We focus on improving economically important but under-researched crops from developing world. Currently we do research on tef (Eragrostis tef), a major cereal crop from Ethiopia. Tef is closely related to finger millet (Eleusine coracana) that is mainly cultivated in India and Africa. The crop is particularly important because it adapts to diverse climatic and soil conditions and also tolerates many pests and diseases. In addition to its nutritional advantages, the seeds of tef are free of gluten, a substance found in wheat and other cereals for which high number of people are allergic.

Our research focuses in four areas:

Lodging Resistant Tef: Lodging is the major constraint to increasing the yield of tef. Tef has a tall and tender stem which is susceptible to damage by wind and rain. We implement a modern improvement technique to develop lodging resistant semi-dwarf tef cultivars.

Drought Tolerant Tef: Drought is another bottleneck for increasing productivity in tef. Drought and erratic rains are common in Ethiopia where they tremendously reduce the productivity of crops. We are interested to develop drought tolerant tef cultivars using high-throughput techniques.

Tef Genome Sequencing Initiative: The number of organisms with full-genome sequencing is growing. So far, the completed genome sequencing is available for several crop plants including rice, maize and sorghum. Whole genome sequencing is important particularly for orphan crops such as tef, for which less genetic and genomic resources are available. We have launched the Tef Genome Sequencing Project in the beginning of 2010.

Technology Transfer to Ethiopia: In collaboration with the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, we evaluate the performance of promising tef lines in the field especially for lodging- and drought-tolerance. One of our best candidate line has been introgressed to the high-yielding and adaptable cultivars and progenies are currently grown in the field in Ethiopia.

We implement the high-throughput technique called TILLING for the lodging- and drought-tolerant projects. TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions IN Genomes) has been successfully applied to cereal crops such as maize, barley and wheat. We have established about 7000 mutagenized tef population to be used for TILLING. The method of TILLING is modified for the discovery of natural nucleotide polymorphism, for which the term ecoTILLING is given. We are utilizing 500 tef accessions in our EcoTILLING study.